Kitchen Boy (8 page)

‘I’ll make sure the speaker keeps it short.’

‘It may mean cutting out someone important.’

‘So be it. Being a Moth was important to my father.’

‘Very well, then.’ It was a grudging concession.

Having won the argument, Hugh had to warn Lofty Munn not to talk for longer than three minutes.

‘It’s not enough.’

‘It’s all you’re allowed. There are other speakers. Please understand.’

Lofty grumbled, ‘Nobody wants to listen these days. War’s two a penny. But I’ll pin their ears back. Owe it to J J.’

‘Three minutes at the most?’

A bitter smile bared yellowed teeth. ‘Understood.’

Pint-sized Lofty had lost a leg to gangrene at Campo 47 near Modena. He’ll tell them how it was, for effing sure. He sits at the aisle end of the second Moth pew, his notes shaking in the hand gripping his crutches as he awaits his cue.

‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord hath taken away.’ With a flourish, the bishop raises both hands. ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

Bobby Brewitt sits next to his wife Petronella in the third pew, thinking, The Lord hath taken away, for sure. Can’t believe J J has gone. It seems just like yesterday that we were kids, and here I am, eighty-two in the shade, still alive and kicking.

He nudges Petronella and whispers, ‘Thanks to you.’

‘What do you mean?’ she mouths back.

‘You’ve looked after me. I’m grateful to still be here, girl.’

‘Girl!’ she snorts, a cheerful hippo in a floral dress with matching picture hat bought at Milady’s for the important funeral, not wanting to let Bobby down by looking like a boerevrou from the sticks. He’d married her when he started as a porter on the railways. It took them thirty years to work up from a plot to a small banana farm near Port Shepstone, but they got there. Now they have grandchildren going to school with Zulu kids like the ones who used to hang around the back steps of the trading store with nothing to do.

Bobby couldn’t go to war because of bad eyesight; it seemed terrible at the time, but he was grateful when he saw the problems war sicked up afterwards. J J wasn’t the same when he came home. But he never forgot his old friend, making sure that Bobby got a complimentary ticket for every match he played in Durban, and in later years sending him invitations to the Breweries hospitality suite. Bobby only went once, because he felt out of place in velskoens and a sports coat that had seen better days. It was also hard to get used to J J being so famous.

He prefers to remember way back to Umfolozi. How his father Reg walked out onto the platform just before noon every day in his stationmaster’s black suit with waistcoat – his Zobo watch on its looped chain – wearing a peaked cap and carrying red and green flags. Soon there’d be a toot-toot among the thorn trees and a steam locomotive came chuffing in, pulling trucks and a guard’s van. The brass pipes were shining, and the engine driver hung his elbow out the window.

Half the village turned out when the train came, to unload or just stand and watch. The hatches and doors on the trucks clanged open. Boxes and cartons and sacks and farming implements were hustled out. Canvas postbags were dumped from the guard’s van onto the platform. Drums rumbled down gangplanks. People shouted. Dogs barked. On the siding, the last bundles of sugar cane were stamped down into place. A ganger uncoupled empty cane trucks, signalled the driver to shunt forward, then back into the siding, and hitched on the loaded ones. At last Reg Brewitt’s whistle blew and his green flag dropped. There was a jerk and the clamour of couplings as pistons began to move again and the wheels turned and the train chuffed away through the thorn trees back to the main line.

Men loaded bundles of sugar cane all day during the season, their shoulders padded with sacks as they ran stooping up wooden gangplanks to heave in the bundles. On the far side of the trucks, Bobby and J J and their cohort of Zulu boys swarmed up the iron ladders to steal sticks of cane, then slid down to find a shady place to sit and shave off the thick maroon skin with a shared knife, and bite off chunks to chew and suck. The gravel round the station was littered with chewed sugar-cane fibre.

They had to watch out for Reg, who knew what boys got up to on trains. He patrolled the trucks, his signal flags rolled round their sticks, and if he caught any of the boys, he’d whack their legs and shout at them to bugger off. Though not if Mrs Kitching was looking. You didn’t swear in front of ladies – a rule that Bobby still obeys.

But Mr Kitching swore, all right. He was a mean bastard who flicked his riding crop at the men unloading goods from the trucks, shouting, ‘Shesha, man! Get a fucking move on. I haven’t got all bloody day.’ He’d already have had a few beers by then.

Into the trading store went sacks of mealie meal, stampmielies, peanuts, rice, and government sugar carried on bent backs; cartons of cigarettes, sweets, groceries, and bales of cotton goods piled on wheelbarrows; barrels of diesoline, oil, paraffin and petrol rolled along, hand-overhand, in the hot dust.

The petrol was for the tall red Pegasus pump that stood in front of the store, its metal jacket padlocked. Sometimes, as a special treat, Bobby and J J were allowed to unlock it and work the handle back and forth, pumping petrol that bubbled up into one of the glass cylinders until it was level with the gallon mark, then letting it run down the thick hose into a car’s petrol tank or a jerry can. There weren’t many cars in those Depression years, just the odd Ford, dusty farm lorries and, once a year, Mr Herald’s Hudson.

Dot Kitching had been Dorothy Herald, granddaughter of a sugar baron, before she married Victor and he pissed her money away. Her father said that she’d made her bed and now she must lie on it, but he and Mrs Herald would come on Christmas Day bringing pointless presents. Perfume and silk scarves for Dot. Roller skates and party clothes for Johnny and Barbara. And nothing but contempt for Victor, which meant brawling binges into the new year.

Landela mostly worked the petrol pump: a man whose sweating muscles gleamed like the malt and cod-liver oil your mother gave you in a big spoon. Bobby remembers the fishy cloying sweetness to this very day.

Reverend George is not used to microphones. His township-hall voice is a thumped tin guitar to the bishop’s clarinet, and his first words are croaked.

‘Psalm 39. I said,’ he gives a strangled cough to clear his throat, ‘I
said
, I will take heed to my ways that I offend not in my tongue.’

One of the girls sitting behind Sam giggles and whispers just loud enough for him to hear, ‘I didn’t tell you. Marco offended me with his tongue last night.’

‘Sis, man, Sharon. You shouldn’t talk like that at a funeral.’

‘So? I can still think what I like. Marco reckons he doesn’t go around French-kissing just any chick.’

‘Shoosh. Mom’ll get mad.’

Sam daren’t look around, but he turns his head sideways to hear better. He wonders what’s different about French kissing.

The whispering starts again. ‘Why did she make us come, anyway?’

‘He was her
boss
, remember.’

‘That was a zillion years ago. Before she got married and had us.’

‘Plus, he’s famous. Didn’t you see the cameras? Maybe we’ll be on TV news tonight.’

‘So that’s why you wore your new mini. You could’ve told me.’

‘How was I supposed to sniff?’

‘You knew and didn’t say. Typical. You make me sick. I wish I wasn’t your sister. I wish I was Marco’s, then we could French-kiss all we like.’

‘Sharon! That’d be incest.’

‘So?’

‘It’s disgusting. You can go to jail, even.’

‘
You’re
disgusting.’

‘Be quiet, you two!’

The command from further along the pew ends any more revelations. Sam isn’t sure what incest means. He’ll have to sneak a look at the whisperers when the congregation stands up again.

Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.

– W
ILLIAM
C
ONGREVE
,
The Mourning Bride

Valerie Palmer, J J’s private secretary during his corporate years as Durban manager for SA Breweries, was known to everyone as Palmer the Charmer. Tall, thin, dressed like a model, auburn and ambitious. Valerie’s glossy lips issued orders disguised in compliments. Her high heels rapped an authoritative Morse code down the corridors. Her matching nails clacked on her typewriter keyboard.

J J called her a company asset, leaving her to organise everything from board meetings, to the distribution of Christmas booty for other executives, to buying presents for his family on their birthdays. Shirley worried the whole time Valerie worked for him that she’d lure him away with her glamour and power over men who went all silly in her presence, snickering and straightening their ties.

Valerie did her best to let J J know she was just the woman for him and available. Though tempted, J J had always been wary of predatory women and avoided the bait. She moved on to greener pastures, but her bosses seemed equally loath to dump their dull wives, despite all her efforts at corporate elegance and making vigorous nookie on business trips. In despair by her late thirties, she married a gambler who wanted sons and dumped her after their second daughter’s birth.

Charmers who succumb to rage when their hopes are dashed don’t age well. Her crêpe de Chine lips pout, her eyebrows are pencilled on, her hair’s too red, her clothes have been bought in covert sorties to inconspicuous shops that stock rich women’s discards. Her glare at J J’s coffin says: I should be the grieving widow here. Me! Not that mousy nobody.

‘Go!’ The guards prodded them forward with rifles.
‘Hang on, chaps.’ Major Irving stood his ground, gathering the shreds of dignity left to an officer in battledress fit only for a dog’s basket.

He turned to the SS Hauptsturmführer who had been sauntering behind them. ‘What’s this place?’ The man made an abrupt gesture with his swagger stick. ‘Für die Jagd. Go!’

M
ULTI-HUED LOZENGES OF REFRACTED LIGHT
crawl up the stone columns as the sun moves towards mid-afternoon. Reverend George brays, ‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle while the ungodly is in my sight.’

Lin remembers her father and other Moths talking in low voices about the ungodly when they had evening meetings in the dining room. She had a hiding place under the yesterday, today and tomorrow bush outside the window, and the sickly smell of the purple and white blooms still makes her think of ugly dark secrets, a Pandora’s box of men’s terrors. She squatted there listening to things that had happened in their war, transfixed by stories of bombings and bloody deaths and grown-up men crying. These were her father’s friends who stood around at braais drinking beers and joking, yet in that room they spilled over with the horror and rage that crawled under the surface of their lives like reptiles. One of them shot himself when she was ten and she heard her father say to Shirley, ‘He never got free of the nightmares, poor sod.’

‘And you have?’

‘Learnt to live with the buggers,’ was his answer.

Lin recalls the quizzical look on Shirley’s face. Her mother is an enigma, her intelligence seemingly satisfied by household trivia. Lin’s twenties and early thirties were so focused on living up to her father’s expectations – getting a good degree, finding a challenging job in IT, then working her way up in the organisation – that there was no space for cooking or sewing or gardening.

‘How will you survive if there’s another depression?’ Shirley said more than once. ‘If there are more atom bombs or disasters like earthquakes that change life as we know it? We’d all have to grow our own food. You’d be helpless without your computers and car and all those restaurants where you eat.’

‘Don’t be such a doom-monger, Mum.’

‘Your father and I lived through a time like that. I worry about you, darling. Being clever and competent is not enough.’

‘You don’t have to worry. I can pay people to do things.’

But her mother nagged on. ‘You need to think about your future, Linda. I wish you could find a nice steady man to marry.’

Like Dad? Lin thought. No way. Too domineering – like all men of his generation. I couldn’t stand it. But all she said was, ‘You know I’m too independent to be tied down to domesticity. My career’s important to me.’

‘You’ll be on the shelf for good if you wait much longer.’

One of Shirley’s skills was prescience. When Lin married a senior colleague who seemed compatible, it lasted a year before he started sleeping with other women, saying Lin was too bossy. After a messy divorce she had to leave the organisation and start job-hunting again. The only halfway interesting position was in the KwaZulu-Natal archives, where she is in charge of the genealogy database and photographic library. Shirley says she’s wasting her life there. Lin thinks her mother has wasted
her
life in the shadow of a hero.

Jesus H Christ, Lofty Munn fumes, not one of these folk dressed up to the nines knows a damn thing about what ungodly really means. They don’t realise that God abandoned us when he saw another world war breaking out, and never came back.

Lofty had been a corporal with the 5th South African Brigade overwhelmed by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrika Korps at Sidi Rezegh on 23 November 1941. The officers and wounded were taken away in vehicles. Lofty and two thousand other ranks were made to walk for almost four days in blazing sun, with no water for the first two days, and after that only half a biscuit and a brackish mouthful. Italian guards hustled them on. Staggering, delirious men collapsed all around him, their burnt faces bloating. Reason evaporated like the shimmering desert mirages. Newman Robinson of the 10th South African Field Ambulance, also on the Thirst March, wrote: ‘All the known precepts of civilised society had vanished. Men fought for water like hyenas after carrion.’

That was only the beginning. They were kept in wire cages, shouted at, slammed with rifle butts, bullied, threatened, starved, and scoured by dysentery. When they were stumble-marched to the ships that would take them to prisoner-of-war camps in Italy, so many were crammed into the holds that they could not lie down. Sitting upright, squashed together, they slept in puddles of stinking pee and shit. And that was before his leg went vrot.